Sunday, September 5, 2010

Truth to power

A gathering at Te Papa: for the first time I meet JudithBinney, whom I interviewed by phone a few weeks agofor the Listener. She was in Menorca, Spain, and I wasin Wellington. I had read her book Encircled Lands ina kind of white heat in order to interview her about it.The book, which has since won the supreme award inthis year’s national book awards, tells in relentlesslyclinical detail how Tuhoe were stripped, cheated androbbed of their land by the predatory Pakeha in thelate 19th and early 20th centuries. Binney is stilldismayed, as she was in the interview, by the PrimeMinister’s about-face on granting Tuhoe authority overTe Urewera National Park. Much has changed, andimproved, in the past 30-40 years in terms of Pakeharecognition of what was done to, and what is owed to,Maori—when she and Binney were young academics,Claudia Orange told the gathering, Maori were all butinvisible—but John Key’s abrupt announcementseemed to kick us right back to the 1890s. Binney’sbook is, however, not only a landmark but a lighthouse,and I believe that the illumination it casts will shine sostrongly that, in time, it will help to change attitudes.It will last longer than Key or any government; it willnever stop speaking truth to power.